Kazuo Ishiguro, who celebrates his 70th birthday today, is that rarest of things: a critically acclaimed novelist — Booker winner, Nobel winner, knight of the realm — who is also much loved by the reading public. Civil in person, he writes books where an unruffled surface covers turbulent emotional depths. But which of his books is best? The difficulty with ranking Ishiguro’s work is that, unusually among his contemporaries, he has never written a bad novel. But some are better than others, and his books have distinct flavours that appeal in different directions. Here’s my ranking of all Ishiguro’s published fiction.
Ishiguro approached the task of writing a collection of short fiction with typical rigour: this isn’t a ragbag of previously published stories but a sequence written as one coherent book. It’s themed around music, but the short form doesn’t really suit an author who achieves his best effects with a slow, cumulative build. There are familiar themes: failed potential in Cellists, where a musician decides her talent is such a fragile flower she daren’t actually develop it; wasted time, where in Crooner a musician gets to work with his hero, but only when the latter’s career is on the skids. And there’s welcome weirdness in Come Rain or Come Shine, where a character ends up impersonating a dog to get out of a sticky situation. The comedy of embarrassment has never been so serious.
What we said at the time: “Technically accomplished, quickly forgotten.”
8. A Pale View of Hills (1982)
Ishiguro’s debut novel is about two mothers and two daughters: the narrator Etsuko, living in England, is mourning the death of her daughter, Keiko, and thinking about her past in Japan with her friend Sachiko, whose own daughter, Mariko, was deeply troubled. Like most of Ishiguro’s narrators, Etsuko is trapped by her past. The novel’s weakness is that Ishiguro hadn’t yet worked out how to strike a balance between mystery and revelation, and A Pale View of Hills, while beautifully written, often tilts from pleasant mental exercise into effortful obscurity.
What we said at the time: “A macabre and faultlessly worked enigma.”
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7. Klara and the Sun (2021)
If Ishiguro’s novels are divided into two kinds — the meticulously precise and the messily tangled — then this story, sleek and simple on the surface, is firmly in the first category. It’s cheerfully told by Klara, a robot or “artificial friend” tasked with befriending a sick girl, Josie. The story is about the ever-present issue of artificial intelligence, but also more elemental concerns: human potential, the desire to be needed, even the question of whether human life is all that special anyway. It’s fascinating, but it ranks low because the developments can be a touch forced and predictable.
What we said at the time: “Tender, touching and true.”
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6. The Buried Giant (2015)
If Klara and the Sun is one type of Ishiguro novel, The Buried Giant exemplifies the other: this baggy monster is a foggy story set in an early-medieval England where nobody can remember the past, and where an ageing couple, Axl and Beatrice, set out to find their son — who may not even exist. It’s about how societies remember and forget, how we build convictions from empty air, and although some readers will find its mysteries maddening, elements are as good as anything Ishiguro has written: the first time he’s portrayed a marriage, say, or a terrifying scene with pixies. When I first read The Buried Giant, I couldn’t settle into anything afterwards because I just wanted to go back to the rich world Ishiguro had created. Secret trivia: until the last minute, Ishiguro planned to call this novel Blackwaterside, after the folk song.
What we said at the time: “There won’t, I suspect, be a more important work of fiction published this year.”
5. Never Let Me Go (2005)
A mid-table ranking for Ishiguro’s most popular novel? Well, his creation of the sinister world of Kathy H is exemplary, the secret at its heart is horrifying, and the whole thing is an original way of using an extreme example to talk about the limitations of all our lives. But once the secret is revealed, the answers come freely and with less richness than in Ishiguro’s very best work: the characteristic flatness here seems to go below the surface too. Still, any book that provokes mixed feelings — “Why don’t they leg it?” Tony Parsons demanded in response to Kathy’s passivity, when reviewing the book on Newsnight Review — can’t be bad.
What we said at the time: “A fine novel, fiction as moving and horrifying as The Handmaid’s Tale or The Chrysalids.”
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4. When We Were Orphans (2000)
This book was not widely loved on its release and a friend of mine denounced it as unrealistic. But that’s the point: its befuddled narrator, Christopher Banks, believes himself to be a great detective in 1930s Shanghai — but then, he also believes he was popular at school and we have evidence otherwise (friends call him a “miserable loner”). Most of all, Christopher is hamstrung by his parents’ disappearance and feels he can make things right if only he can solve one last mystery. When We Were Orphans is a tricky bird, rather like Christopher himself; an existential mystery disguised as a realistic detective story. It’s a mind-blowing performance.
What we said at the time: “You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction.”
3. An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
Ishiguro didn’t take long to warm up: his second novel was his first masterpiece. It features perhaps the best of Ishiguro’s many unreliable narrators: Masuji Ono, a retired artist living in postwar Japan and coming to terms with his part in the country’s imperialist past. It’s a book that simultaneously looks outwards at the world — at national pride and generational divisions — and inside at the heart. Ishiguro tells the reader just enough to satisfy us, but holds things back to keep us engaged. It’s a book about the mental hoops we jump through to live with our mistakes — and who among us can’t recognise that?
What we said at the time: “A work of spare elegance, refined, understated, economic.”
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2. The Unconsoled (1995)
Here is the Ishiguro book I would take to a desert island: you could read and reread it and never quite get to the bottom of it. A pianist, Ryder, comes to a European city to perform, but he keeps getting sidetracked, the way we do in dreams, and starts to feel that the whole city’s happiness — not to mention his parents’ approval — depends on his recital. It’s a knotty whirligig of a story, a novel about the modern epidemic of stress, where the people Ryder meets represent aspects of himself — and it’s funnier than most of Ishiguro’s novels. It was controversial at the time — one critic said it “invents its own category of badness” — and remains divisive, but there’s nothing quite like it.
What we said at the time: “A masterpiece. It is above all a book dedicated to the human heart.”
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1. The Remains of the Day (1989)
A novel of clockwork perfection, a precision-tooled jewel about love, war, regret, patriotism, fathers and sons, self-deception and dignity, told by a butler in one of the great houses of postwar England. Ishiguro wrote it as a refinement of his first two novels: he wanted people to see that their themes were not peculiar to Japan, but universal. But in the tragedy of the story — and the sombre approach taken by the film adaptation — don’t overlook how funny this book is, from buttoned-up Stevens accidentally telling a dirty joke to a bunch of farmers, to his awkward attempts to tell an engaged young man the facts of life. “Sir David wishes you to know, sir, that ladies and gentlemen differ in certain key respects.” Ishiguro always viewed it as a comedy, and when a film was first planned, the original screenwriter Harold Pinter wanted the part of Stevens to be played by John Cleese. Yes, that John Cleese.
What we said at the time: “A triumph … by turns funny, absurd and ultimately very moving.”
Which is your favourite Kazuo Ishiguro novel, and why? Tell us in the comments below
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